Cecil vs. Planned Parenthood: Raging at the Death of the Innocents

Last updated on: August 2, 2015 at 1:22 pm by Kate O'Hare

Cecil vs. Planned Parenthood: Raging at the Death of the Innocents 2015-08-02T13:22:14-08:00 Kate O'Hare

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In an elegantly reasoned op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Fordham University bioethics instructor Charles Camosy looks at the twin Internet furors over the undercover videos depicting Planned Parenthood’s practice of trafficking in the body parts of prenatal infants, and the shooting of Zimbabwe’s famed Cecil the lion during a canned hunt.

Camosy doesn’t claim moral equivalency between the two things, but he does point out some interesting similarities.

On animal-rights supporters:

Animals are helpless creatures, often subject to terrible violence, and they cannot speak for themselves. Their dignity and value are quite inconvenient for those who want to exploit them, and their needs are pushed to the margins of our culture. Indeed, we are rarely forced to confront the dignity of animals, especially animals we eat. This is what drives the passion of activists in their attempts to speak for voiceless animals. And in their zeal to bring us face to face with animal suffering, tellingly, they regularly use undercover videos. These videos have been quite successful in bringing some terrible realities to light – for example, the conditions of chickens in the worst factory farms.

And no doubt, if the factory farmers had complained that their rights were violated by the activists in seeking these undercover videos, not many people outside the farming industry would have cared one whit.

By the same token, nobody wants to hear about how canned hunts, if conducted correctly, are legal (the dentist who shot Cecil depended on his guides and didn’t know the lion came from a protected reserve), or that, whatever you think of the hunts (and I think canned hunts are for posers), they provide income for local residents and an incentive to maintain viable wildlife populations.

Then, Camosy writes of pro-life activists:

Prenatal children are also helpless and often subject to terrible violence. They obviously cannot speak for themselves. Their dignity and value are inconvenient for those who want abortion to be broadly legal and who want to use fetal tissue for research. They too are largely invisible, though this is changing because of ultrasound imagery and smartphone applications that can listen to a baby’s heartbeat in the womb. Words like “fetus,” “tissue” and “products of conception” help keep the reality of abortion at bay. But as we have now seen with the Planned Parenthood story, anti-abortion activists have also been successful in using undercover videos in bringing terrible reality to light – what in one setting is called the “products of conception” in another is a “baby bump,” and the antiseptic “tissue” means functioning organs.

There are those who think the value of animal and human lives to be identical. And there are those who consider the wishes of a pregnant woman to absolutely inviolable, even if they cost her child its life.

And there are millions of other people who fall somewhere in between. These days, though, it’s nearly impossible to have a rational conversation about any of this, but Camosy’s essay is a step in the right direction, no matter where you fall on the spectrum.

Click here to read all of it.

Image: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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